In late April, visitors to Harbour Lights in Falmouth, Cornwall, may have raised an eyebrow. The fish and chip shop was in the midst of a “cod-free week”, its owners having removed cod from its menu entirely.

It was the second time owner Pete Fraser had undertaken the experiment, 15 years after the first. He also removed cod from his shops in Penzance and Helston, replacing it with coley, pollack, hake and hoki. The result was very different. “Some of the feedback we had, which certainly wasn’t what we got when we ran it years ago, is ‘Can you repeat this?’ Before, it was like, ‘Have you guys lost your head’?”

Part of the motivation for chippies making moves like Fraser is down to price. The average cost of a fish supper has risen from £6.48 in 2019 to £11.17, according to the Office for National Statistics. A barrage of pressures, from Brexit to dwindling fish populations and fishing quotas, pandemic inflation to war in Ukraine and the Middle East, has sent prices, particularly of cod, soaring.

Owners report regulars visiting less and, that when they do, they are often now sharing meals. Hundreds of chippies are up for sale; almost half of owners are “extremely worried” about the future, according to the National Federation of Fish Friers (NFFF).

The Gila River is among the Southwest's most important rivers, delivering water for people, farms, and wildlife while linking the snow-fed mountains of southwestern New Mexico to the desert lowlands of southwestern Arizona.

In wetter years, seasonal snowfall on the Mogollon Mountains and Black Range provides much of the river's spring flow and helps refill San Carlos Reservoir, which is formed by the Coolidge Dam. When filled to capacity, the reservoir is one of Arizona's largest bodies of water.

However, in 2026, lackluster snowfall left the mountain snowpack in the Gila River watershed at 2 percent of the 1991-2020 March median. The limited snowpack pushed April streamflow to 39 percent of normal. By June, after mandatory water releases for downstream agriculture, the reservoir held less than 400 acre-feet of water.

The Landsat image above (right) shows the near-empty reservoir on May 22, 2026, when it stored 389 acre-feet of water—less than 1 percent full; the other image (left) shows the same area in June 2023, when it was about 60 percent full. The green vegetation growing along the river channel and reservoir edge includes a mixture of tamarisk, willow, cottonwood, sedges, and grasses.

Take a stroll over to digital Walt Disney World over on reddit. Normally a festive little consumerist corner of the internet, now a downtrodden affair melting in tragedy. The concrete house of mouse, notorious for a lack of shade and unhealthy relationship with asphalt, broke cast members, rides, and guests. In other words, the systems designed for a climate of the past did not heed the warning of the displaced Mr. Toad's finale. Hell is, indeed, terrifying. And hot. Very, very hot.

Let's take a step back from that for a minute though. For the uninitiated, what would become Walt Disney World was a detour into something comfortable for a grieving company. Walt's last brain child before he died of lung cancer was largely scrapped for a near carbon copy of the humble Anaheim location. But bigger and transplanted to a sparsely populated swamp. To keep the encrouching businesses far away from "the happiest place on earth" the Magic Kingdom sat a good 10-20 minute drive from every property line. Two hotels, a theme park, and a very forward looking transportation network greeted the first guests. Frankly, it was quite beautiful. And it just felt cool, in a temperature sense. Trees, undisturbed sub tropical forests, rivers and creeks twisting through otherwise multilayered canopies. Canopies thick in a way reminiscent of crunchy peanut butter. So much packed into such little space. It was also an urban planning and transportation triumph for decades.

I admit, I am always impressed when I open plans and cases to show students what is possible in urban design and enginereering. I always point to the trash chutes whisking away your half eaten burger to a compost pile that helps make biofuel for a bus fleet. I marvel with the students at the tens, no, hundreds of thousands of people moving by bus, boat, monorail, train, tram, ski lift gondola, and car. The movement and storage for food, water, and sewage makes even a grizzly general weep over the logistical glory. I never, however, looked at HVAC. I did today.

Today, Lake Buena Vista, the "city" the resort claims, hit nearly 94 F. That's 34C and a few digits for the rest of the world. A humidity above 50, nay above 70. A whopping 85%. A "feels like" temperature of 111 F or 43 C on the asphalt addicted, shadeless, reflective surface that is Main Street, USA. Hotter in the stifling queues of Thunder Mountain. Inescapable in the theaters, showrooms, restaurants, and hotels. The air conditioning, bled into the air in open storefronts and buildings all across the resort, could not keep up. People on reddit complained, expecting compensation for the sweltering temps and bad cooling systems left over from the Eisner years. I read too many comments. Many not capable of coming to grips with just how overwhelmed the climate control system was. Perhaps ignoring the reality of today, and blaming a nameless subsystem somewhere behind a "cast members only" sign was a trauma response to dropping $10,000 on a weeks vacation to a place you could neither go outside in nor sit in a room to escape. I no longer looked at whimsical trash slides under a Pecos Bills. I think of cooling failure and the redditors unable to see, or face, the bigger problem. You can't engineer or complain your way out of an active environmental systems collapse. You also should not rip out all that cooling and fill the landscape with generic skyscraper hotels. Boy does Bay Lake and the Seven Seas Lagoon just look like a tragic case of Sketchup Contemporary Style now adays.

You see, Walt Disney World was designed for a world in a climate past. When an event like this was not only rare, but a statistical improbability. You engineered systems around much understood norms. Humidity stays in this range. Temperature that. Metals react in such a way. You stamp the approval and make an air duct. You leave trees off a street because its tough to maintain the sidewalk. You keep the doors to the candy store open because the cool air and the smell invite you to come in and buy. Get out of the heat, a rice krispie treats begs, and indulge. That's all gone. If not gone altogether, today was an indicator that it will be quite soon. If the over engineered everything in Mickey Town couldn't hold up, how screwed are our other systems? Very if the hospitals I know of are any indicator. Where HVAC matters a lot, and where a ten year old system can't filter out fungus anymore because its too humid. But back to theme parks.

I focus on one comment. That the Wilderness Lodge lost all cooling. Angering, how dare they fail, and two free room nights. I want to scream at the absurdity. You could die in such an environment. You can not evaporate your sweat in wet bulb conditions very close to what we saw in WDW today. You can go for a walk from Space Mountain to Splash, and simply die. Even for the in shape, which are few and far between amongst folks debating between another Dole Whip and an abnormally large Turkey leg, the walk is dangerous. But such guests asking for a few nights or a coupon for a $16 jack and coke (yes, that is typed right) aren't entirely off their rocker. I come to empathize a bit. They want compensation for a climate disaster in a way. More people are going to, as well, for everything from light rails failing commuters in Portland, farmers finding their crops rotting quicker. It makes me glad I'm not in insurance. I'm also very glad I don't have to be the 20 something college program intern facing an angry mom of 4 demanding a less melty Mickey Mouse Ice Cream Sandwhich. Both professions have a rather dismal future.

Alas, poor (Disney) World. I knew it, Beehawian.

FULL ARTICLE: There’s some good news growing along the coasts of countries around the world.

Mangrove forests, the imperiled ecosystems championed for their ability to store carbon and protect land from storm-driven flooding, are bouncing back.

These woodlands that thrive at the soggy boundary between land and sea suffered alarming declines through much of the 20th century, chopped down chiefly to make way for fish ponds, rice paddies and other kinds of agriculture. But in the last decade, mangroves have been gaining ground, erasing nearly all of the losses since 1980, according to research recently published in Science.

“After decades of loss, we’re finally seeing a global turning point for mangroves,” said Zhen Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher at Tulane University and lead author of the study.

Zhang and colleagues used computer programs to comb through 40 years of satellite images from around the world. The distinctive way mangrove forests reflect light enabled them to train the computers to pick out this vegetation and track its ebb and flow over time.

The analysis revealed that in much of the world, years of loss began changing course in recent decades. Between the 1980s and 2010, global mangrove forests shrank from around 155,000 square kilometers to 152,000 square kilometers, a loss equal to half of Rhode Island. While that might not sound like a lot, mangroves often grow in relatively narrow coastal strips, so their coast-protecting benefits are outsized compared to their overall dimensions.

Since 2010, forests have rebounded to nearly 154,000 square kilometers, almost enough to recover from the losses dating back to the 80s.

“While some mangroves are still being lost, this could make them a rare conservation success story and an important source of optimism for climate action,” said Daniel Friess, a co-author who heads The Mangrove Lab at Tulane.

The greatest gains have come in southeast Asia, home to roughly a third of the world’s mangrove forests. The region gained more than 1,000 square kilometers of mangroves since 2010, the researchers found. Forests have begun bouncing back in other parts of Asia, South America and the Middle East as well.

While the reasons for the rebound vary from place to place, the researchers say many of the gains appear to be from forests colonizing terrain created by abandoned aquaculture ponds and from mudflats emerging along shorelines as sediment builds up. That is coupled with efforts to plant new mangrove forests, as governments and conservation groups have come to better appreciate their benefits.

In Indonesia, once a center for mangrove declines, the recent gains appear to be linked to increased awareness and restoration on the heels of the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, coupled with increased legal protections and management, the authors reported.

It’s not all good news, however. Some regions continue to lose ground, notably in Africa. There, mangroves have declined in recent years in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, the continent’s largest mangrove system, due at least in part to damage from oil pollution.

And some places that are making gains still haven’t recovered from previous losses. Myanmar has witnessed a 10% increase in mangrove forests since 2010. But that still leaves it with a net 29% decline since the 1980s.

The tree’s remarkable ability to quickly colonize land suggests that rather than pursuing tree-planting projects, conservation work might be better spent protecting existing forests and the earth-building dynamics that create mudflats, the authors noted. The trees can then spread on their own. Sometimes the most important thing humans can do for restoring nature is get out of the way.

Zhang, et. al. “Unexpected expansion and regrowth in Earth’s mangrove forests over the past four decades.” Science. June 4, 2026.

US political and media discourse has drifted away from the climate crisis amid a frontal assault by Donald Trump upon policies to limit global heating and the president’s pugnacious demands to “drill, baby, drill” for more oil and gas.

Yet while elite attention on climate has waned, even among some previously vocal Democrats who have wound back on criticism of the fossil fuels that are overheating our planet, the American public remains concerned about the climate crisis and continues to favour action to deal with it, according to experts and polling.

“The 2024 election was not a referendum on climate change – Americans believe in climate change, worry about climate change and support action on climate change,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the climate communication program at Yale University. “That didn’t change before, during or after the election.”

About two-thirds of Americans say they are worried about the climate crisis, Yale’s longstanding climate polling has found, with this proportion staying consistent even as other topics such as the Iran war and inflation have dominated news cycles.

However, people in the US are hearing and reading less about climate change as the media shrinks its coverage of the issue, despite mounting heatwaves, droughts and other impacts that have roiled parts of the country. Outlets including the Washington Post, NPR and CBS have also cut climate journalist positions.

Rising temperatures may trigger a dangerous increase in “hydroclimatic whiplash” in rivers that would make traditional approaches to flood and drought planning insufficient, a study has found.

As temperatures rise owing to the worsening climate crisis, rivers will experience increasingly rapid transitions between heavy downpours and long dry spells – called hydroclimatic whiplash events – because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, intensifying rainfall extremes.

Sudden swings from dry to wet conditions may increase the risk of flash flooding, the study found, because intense rainfall on dry, hardened soil is less able to infiltrate the ground. Instead, water can rapidly run off the surface leading to local flooding and water quality deterioration, as well as soil erosion because intensive rainfall can flush pollutants into the rivers.

In comparison, wet-to-dry shifts can make drought planning harder because preceding wet conditions may create a false sense of security before a rapid move into drought.

Former federal climate experts warn that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations hit a record high in May and that the monthly average global temperature this summer could rise as much as 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.9 degrees Celsius) above the pre-industrial benchmark used to measure the heating from greenhouse gases.

Research shows human-caused warming will contribute significantly to deadly heat waves, intensified storms and wildfires, atmospheric scientist Zack Labe said as he opened a Tuesday briefing by a team of experts with Climate Central, a nonprofit research and communications organization based in Washington, D.C.

Labe and several other members of the Climate Central team are former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists. They decided to provide public monthly climate updates after NOAA, citing Trump administration budget cuts, canceled its briefings last year. Climate Central’s monthly briefings are part of a larger effort to ensure useful climate information remains available to the public as the current administration tries to erase the topic from government records.

Several other research groups, including Berkeley Earth and Copernicus, the European Union’s climate change service, also provide monthly public climate updates with data collected from global climate monitoring networks.

“We heard from a lot of folks that they missed the NOAA briefings and being able to talk with experts,” said Climate Central’s Tom Di Liberto. “We were happy to tap into Climate Central’s expertise and combine it with our NOAA experience to bring this to fruition.” He added that Labe leads the monthly briefing and aims to establish the links between human-caused warming and climate extremes.

PJM, the country’s largest power grid operator, is in a tight spot. Thanks to the data center boom, there’s never been more demand for electricity, but years of delay in the interconnection queue has choked off new supply, and PJM’s laissez-faire approach to transmission planning has left us with a grid that needs expensive and time-consuming upgrades. This all adds up to soaring prices and declining reliability, with no end in sight.

Against this backdrop, the White House and governors of all 13 PJM states have pushed PJM to hold a so-called Reliably Backstop Procurement (RBP) to support new resources. The basic idea makes sense: Hold a one-time auction to fund new supply, mostly for data centers. Pay for that new supply at a generous guaranteed price but bill it to the companies that need power without raising prices for everyone else.

PJM stakeholders are in the middle of debating how this should work, and PJM’s board will make a decision at the end of June. Tens of billions of dollars and the region’s energy future are at stake. Fossil fuel cheerleaders in the Trump administration clearly see this as an opportunity to lock in fossil power at public expense through the 2040s. Anyone who cares about clean air or their power bill should be making sure they don’t succeed. That’s why NRDC presented an alternative proposal that protects consumers, gives clean energy a fair chance to compete, and simply has a better chance of getting the new supply that the system needs built.

“This would have been a wild dream a year ago,” says Andrea Ceccolini, standing on Arctic sea ice just a 4-mile snowmobile ride from the Inuit town of Cambridge Bay, northern Canada. To his left are sky blue ponds of meltwater created in the last few days by a sun that no longer sets in the high north summer. To his right, the sea ice is still a brilliant white, the light dusting of snow on top continuing to sparkle.

“It’s incredibly different, the boundary – I mean, you can point to it,” he says. The difference is the result of a bold geoengineering experiment being conducted by Ceccolini’s company, Real Ice, funded by the UK government.

Five months earlier, the team had braved temperatures of -40C on the sea ice to drill holes and pump 50,000 tonnes of ocean water up on to its surface. It froze almost immediately, thickening the 1.5-metre-deep ice by about 50cm, according to the new measurements. That has protected the ice, at the start of the melt season at least, and is an early sign that one day, perhaps, it may be possible to refreeze a significant part of the Arctic.

When a severe drought struck La Calera near Bogotá, many of its residents lost their water for drinking, cooking and farming and faced up to 15 days of strict water rationing each month. Yet the area is home to Chingaza reservoir, which supplies about 70% of the drinking water for Colombia’s capital.

As the drought stretched from April 2024 to April last year, people began to look more closely at how their water was being managed.

“With rationing, people started to reflect a bit about where the water was coming from: ‘Why is there no water in my house, if we always had it on tap?’” says Javier Cifuentes, a local councillor and campaigner for water rights in La Calera.

Attention soon turned to Indega, a subsidiary of Coca-Cola Femsa – the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottler – which was still filling thousands of water bottles a day to sell under the popular Agua Manantial spring water brand, which is sold across Colombia.

News that the plant was continuing to extract water during the drought sparked uproar in La Calera. “They asked us – the people – to ration water but not the companies,” says Alexander Hernández, a local resident.

On an overcast June morning, I step from the rubber-sided Zodiac boat on to a floating barge at the mouth of Ballona Creek, where it meets Santa Monica Bay on the west side of Los Angeles. The first thing I notice? Salty air is the only smell, despite six giant waste bins sitting atop the tennis court-sized barge.

The contraption is actually two barges – a smaller platform sits nestled inside the larger boat. A floating barrier directs rubbish into the device, where a conveyor belt scoops it up. An automated shuttle then distributes the waste into six dumpsters on a separate barge, sending an alert to crews when it is full. Above, solar panels form the ceiling and a conveyor belt runs slowly, dropping bits of plastic and waste into each of the bins. The whole thing can hold about 20,000lbs (9,070kg) of rubbish – the same as one fully loaded lorry.

Since it is the dry season in LA there is not much waste being washed down the river by rainfall. But I still see what the problems are: polystyrene takeaway containers, noodle cups, bottle caps, a yellow pencil, a palm frond dotted with colourful pieces of microplastics. They are all caught up in the boat’s conveyor belt. It’s a pretty representative sample, says James Patterson, the operations manager with the nonprofit Ocean Cleanup, which created the system. “You get a wide variety of basic plastics – a lot of bottles, cups, to-go containers, things from restaurants. That’s typically what we see out here,” he says.

When the waste is pulled out, it is sorted and sent to refuse facilities. “We want to make sure that from start to finish, we’re pulling the trash out in a responsible way, and it’s getting sorted or stored in a responsible manner,” Patterson says. “We don’t want a circular battery of trash here.”

This particular barge is a model for others being deployed around the world. Ocean Cleanup operates in 10 places, with 21 Interceptor systems – in countries including Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Guatemala, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. It aims to clean up the 30 most-polluted cities by 2030.

The upcoming loss of a deep-ocean monitoring system is triggering deep anxiety in Alaska, the nation’s top fish-producing state, where temperatures are warming twice as quickly as the global average.

The National Science Foundation announced plans in May to decommission the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a nearly $368 million network of scientific instruments that tracks ocean chemistry, wave action, water temperature, salinity and a host of other metrics.

The real-time information from these ocean observatories helps scientists, fishery managers, coastal hazard planners and even the military plan and prepare for the future. Whether that’s calculating how much fish can be harvested or when a marine heatwave or giant wave action may be occurring, the data is used by a plethora of sources.

“It helps us see where we’re going and what’s coming at us,” said Jan Newton, University of Washington affiliate professor of biological oceanography.

The NSF’s decision to pull the observatories from the water has alarm bells ringing in fishing circles of Alaska, home to a $5.3 billion commercial seafood industry that employs nearly 42,000 people, according to a recent report that McKinley Research Group prepared for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.

Michelle Stratton, executive director of the Alaska Marine Community Coalition, said the loss of Ocean Station Papa, the deep-ocean observing system situated in the Gulf of Alaska at a depth of nearly 14,000 feet, means the state will lose one of its only systems that documents how the ocean is changing in real time.

• Canada’s independent watchdog for overseas human rights complaints against Canadian companies has been leaderless since May 2025, leaving at least 24 active cases effectively stalled.

• Communities in the Dominican Republic, Namibia, Pakistan and elsewhere say delays have left them without a meaningful avenue to seek accountability for alleged environmental and human rights harms linked to Canadian mining and energy projects.

• Critics argue the office of the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) was already limited by weak investigative powers, and the year-long vacancy has further undermined confidence in the mechanism.

• The leadership gap comes as Canada promotes mining investment tied to growing demand for critical minerals. The vacancy is prompting renewed calls from advocates, former officials and the United Nations for the office to be strengthened and a new ombudsperson appointed urgently

When staff answer the call of nature at the European Space Agency’s headquarters in Paris, their urine is not simply flushed away – it is turned into something much more useful. While urine-diverting toilets are often associated with smelly festival loos, there is nothing bohemian about recycling nutrients from human pee, said David de Chambrier, the chief executive of VunaNexus.

The process isn’t so different from recovering minerals in used electronics.

“Urine is a very concentrated resource. This is not a hippy thing to do; we are recycling minerals,” he said. Similarly to batteries, which should not be thrown in the bin to be recycled, “separating the urine at the source makes its treatment way easier”.

Special toilets that look like normal facilities send the separated liquid, without diluting it with water, down a piping system into a small treatment plant in the basement of the building.

There, the urine goes through a series of tanks that remove micropollutants, such as antibiotics, and concentrate valuable nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus that are essential for plant growth. The liquid is then pasteurised at 90C, killing any potential viruses and other pathogens. The distilled water is separated and reinjected into the flushing system before a liquid fertiliser called Aurin comes out on the other side.

A three-month national investigation by Beyond Plastics found that not a single tracked Starbucks cold-beverage cup ended up at a recycling facility — even when the cups were placed in clearly marked recycling bins inside Starbucks stores. As detailed in the new report, titled “Tracking Starbucks’ Deceptive Recyclability Claims,” the findings directly contradict Starbucks’ recent public claims that its single-use polypropylene (No. 5 plastic) cold cups are “widely recyclable.”

The EJAtlas is a work in progress. Newly documented cases and information are continuously added to the platform. However, many are still undocumented and new ones arise. Please note that the absence of data does not indicate the absence of conflict.

A new World Meteorological Organization report estimated 13,000 annual heat-related deaths across 17 countries in the region.

The report: State of the Climate in Latin America and the Caribbean 2025

Scientists said this week that a developing El Niño is likely to amplify heatwaves, droughts and floods this year, but warned that the long-term warming caused by burning fossil fuels remains the main driver of climate extremes.

El Niño is the warm phase of a semi-regular temperature oscillation in the tropical Pacific Ocean, during which massive amounts of heat stored in the ocean are released into the atmosphere, temporarily raising the average annual global surface temperature by as much as 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

During an online briefing this week, researchers said that the consequences of a moderate or strong El Niño today are more damaging than those of similar events just a few decades ago because the entire global climate system is now substantially warmer.

If the projected El Niño emerges on top of that warmer climate, there is a “serious risk of unprecedented weather extremes” that would not have happened during similar historical El Niños, said Fredi Otto, a professor in climate science at Imperial College London and a lead researcher with World Weather Attribution, a research group assessing how global warming affects climate extremes.

"The campaign to restore the Everglades has received a boost with completion of a key project that returns the flow of water to 55,000 acres that had once been drained for development. Experts see it as a major step forward in bringing back South Florida’s River of Grass."

Malé is one of the world’s most overcrowded cities, but it faces double pressure. As well as a growing population, the capital of the Maldives is also threatened by rising sea levels. Owing to climate breakdown, its living space is shrinking.

So the justification for a land reclamation project seemed clear. Take sand from elsewhere in the archipelago and use it to build up the land available for Malé’s people. What could go wrong? After all, it’s only sand, right?

Around the world, urban development and industry is using sand at a rate of 50bn tonnes a year, a figure that is expected to grow. But a new UN report warns that sand is being extracted faster than it can be replenished, and that this is threatening livelihoods, ecosystems and the very structure of the natural world.

Pascal Peduzzi, the director of the Unep global resource information database Geneva, which prepared the report, said: “Sand is sometimes referred to as the unrecognised hero of development, but its essential role in sustaining the natural services on which we depend is even more overlooked. Sand is our first line of defence against sea level rise, storm surges, and salination of coastal aquifers – all hazards exacerbated by climate change.”

High above the jagged peaks of California’s Sierra Nevada, the view from the cockpit is breathtaking. At first glance, the mountains appear draped in a pristine white blanket. But as the flight crew gears up for a high-stakes mission, the sensors onboard this specialized aircraft prove that looks can be deceiving.

“This is a distinct dry year,” says Tom Painter, CEO of Airborne Snow Observatories.

Painter, who developed this technology at Nasa, isn’t relying on a visual inspection. His plane uses Lidar, or rapid pulses of laser light, to calculate snow depth with surgical precision. “The Lidar sprays out about 800,000 pulses per second,” he explains. The result is a 3D map of snow depth accurate to within 3cm. The technology also helps determine how much water is stored in the snowpack.

In the US west, where mountain ranges act as “frozen reservoirs”, state water managers rely on this data as a survival guide. It helps them plan for exactly how much water will eventually reach the faucets of millions of people and the critical farm fields that feed the nation.

This year, the data is sounding an alarm.